Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898/
Puertas Adentro: Arte en la Casa de la América Española, 1492–1898Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 explores private life and luxury in Spain’s wealthy overseas territories. By the eighteenth century, Spanish America was home to some of the world’s richest people, thanks to the region’s natural resources and burgeoning market economy. Living at the center of the Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, they had access to the finest European, Asian, and American-made luxury goods, which they prominently displayed at home to underscore their social status.

The exhibition presents some 160 objects from around the globe, including works from the Caribbean, whose key role is often overlooked in Spanish colonial art surveys, as well as some comparative British American pieces. Drawn primarily from the Brooklyn Museum’s collections, these artworks are displayed as they would have been in a grand Spanish American home of the time, following its series of rooms located on the piano nobile, or main upper floor. Here, above the bustling streets, strict protocol dictated who could enter these luxuriously decorated spaces, which proceeded from the most public reception rooms to the most private areas: the salón del dosel (baldachin room), the sala (grand reception room), the cuadra de estrado (women’s sitting room), the alcoba (state bedroom), the asistencia (family sitting room), and the oratorio (private chapel).

Spanish Americans of all heritages emulated European collecting practices at home in an effort to elevate themselves in a social order that ranked Spaniards above people of New World birth—Creoles (American-born Spaniards) and people of indigenous and mixed race—and African enslaved people, at the bottom of the hierarchy. In practice, racial classifications were sometimes fluid. Mixed-race Spanish Americans in particular altered their perceived race and status through dress, marriage, falsified genealogical documents, and domestic display of luxury goods. To bring alive the different strata of New World society, the exhibition includes brief biographical profiles of five New World collectors and one painter alongside related artworks.

The objects on view here reveal the daily life and social aspirations of those who resided behind these closed doors.

Salón del Dosel (Baldachin Room)
The salón del dosel, or “baldachin room,” was the first reception room that special visitors entered after passing through an antesala (antechamber) in Spanish America’s grandest noble houses. Open only on important occasions, the space was named after the room’s focal point, an ensemble of a baldachin, or canopy, that crowned an armchair on a raised platform and either a royal portrait or Spain’s coat of arms. The 1695 Mexico City inventory of Doña Teresa Francisca María de Guadalupe Retes Paz y Vera’s salón del dosel lists five canvases, a red canopy with gilded fringe, and a grand walnut chair upholstered with the same fabric.

The salón del dosel served as a shrine to the reigning king, who never set foot on American soil in the colonial period. The room was also a tribute to the crown for creating the family’s noble title. There, the king’s portrait was proudly displayed alongside other Spanish royal portraits, those of the viceroy (the king’s highest-ranking vassal in each viceroyalty), portraits of the family, and the family’s royally bestowed coat of arms.

Sala (Grand Reception Room) Salas were the home’s most sumptuously decorated spaces. There, affluence was flaunted in defiance of the empire’s numerous pragmáticas, laws starting in the late fifteenth century under Ferdinand and Isabella to curb excesses in public and private display of wealth. Historical accounts of the contents of salas cite solid-silver furniture, imported silk wall hangings, and luxurious damask curtains combined in exuberant displays of opulence.

Overlooking the street, salas welcomed everyone from government officials—including, in exceptionally elite cases, the viceroy—and visiting international dignitaries to local parish priests. Visitors were received according to a prescribed protocol, whereby guests presented official letters of introduction and stayed a set length of time. These rooms bustled with comings and goings of the many relatives, lodgers, and free and enslaved servants who made up the Spanish American household.

Cuadra de Estrado (Women’s Sitting Room)
The cuadra de estrado was where the mistress of the house received her guests after daily prayers at church. Its layout derives from Spanish homes from the period of Moorish rule (711–1492). Here, on a raised platform in a separate room or in a corner of the sala or alcoba set off by a folding screen, the women of the household and their guests passed the entire day sewing, gossiping, reading devotional texts, and smoking incessantly. The women sat cross-legged on cushions or very low chairs, almost without changing their position, while their male visitors sat on chairs just outside the platform. Servants would set out meals on low tables or atop small chests in which the ladies kept their needlework.

Estrados were adorned with sumptuous carpets and tapestries, secular and religious paintings and sculptures, small cabinets filled with precious objects, and low tables on which water, chocolate, and maté tea were served.

Alcoba (State Bedroom)
The alcoba, or state bedroom (called the recámara in New Spain), was a multifunctional space. Like the sala, it was decorated in grand style and intended primarily for receiving very important visitors. The bed, which was used only on important occasions such as childbirth, the consummation of a marriage, and the passing of a family member, was among the household’s costliest items, largely because of the precious textiles that accompanied it. The room also contained chests and other storage furniture, a cradle when needed for a newborn, a folding screen (biombo de cama) to enclose the bed for privacy, and perhaps a small table with a writing set.

Other bedrooms in the home were simpler, but their arrangement and decoration would follow those of the alcoba. As a general rule, bedrooms had less furniture than other rooms in the home, but there would be a crucifix, religious paintings, small tabernacles, and sculptures, all of which played important roles in this semi-intimate space that witnessed major life events.

Entre la Ciudad y la Residencia de Campo (Between Town and Country Residences)
The display of family wealth was not restricted to the bounds of the Spanish American house. Transportation and travel between urban town houses and country haciendas required not only some degree of comfort but also a show of magnificence. Sedan chairs and carriages, which functioned as mobile extensions of the domicile, were furnished with European glass windows, silk curtains, and cushions. Portable furniture was part of the luggage of the rich and facilitated travel between urban and rural dwellings. Rawhide traveling trunks, listed in colonial documents as petacas (leather trunks with embroidery in maguey fiber), were used to carry clothing, textiles, and small objects.

Long trips were possible thanks to horses, which were introduced to the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1493 on his second transatlantic crossing. Gentlemen churros (horsemen) in New Spain donned serapes, or rectangular wool garments worn folded lengthwise over one shoulder, while their mounts were equipped with elaborate stirrups of very fine craftsmanship.

Asistencia (Family Sitting Room)
Only the family’s most trusted confidants were admitted beyond the home’s anterooms and reception rooms and through the semipublic estrado and alcoba into the asistencia (family sitting room) and gabinete (private study). In these intimate spaces, family members gathered and played music and card games, embroidered, read, and wrote letters. Easy chairs with pre-Columbian origins called butacas often served as seats for personal use. Private rooms were the only places where a reclining position was socially acceptable under strict Spanish etiquette.

A 1784 inventory of the Mexico City house of the count of San Bartolomé de Xala describes the asistencia as richly decorated with yellow wallpaper adorned with silver and colored flowers and filled with sofas, chairs, tables, crystal mirrors and oil lamps of the latest fashion, religious paintings and sculptures, and “landscapes of hunting scenes painted on glass with black frames and gold edges.”

Oratorio (Private Chapel)
Privileged colonials often enhanced their New World status by obtaining permission from church authorities to dedicate a room in their homes as a private oratory, or chapel. These were not consecrated spaces, but Masses could be held there for the family, servants, and guests. The oratory, along with the estrado, was overseen by the women, who moved between the two spaces in their domestic lives and exercised the most influence on the furnishings and decoration of both. In 1629 Francisca Arias de Monroy, a resident of Santa Fe de Bogotá (now Bogotá, Colombia), was recorded as holding the key to her family’s oratory; her husband had never used it.

Private chapels were often lavishly decorated. The 1664 inventory of the vaulted oratory in the Bogotá home of María Arias de Ugarte details not only all the necessities of the rites of the Mass but also a remarkable collection of sculptures and 114 paintings on canvas and vellum.

Exhibiendo Estatus e Identidad Puertas Adentro (Displaying Status and Identity Behind Closed Doors)
Over four centuries of Spanish rule, America’s Creole, indigenous, and mixed-race elite employed various strategies—among them the display of luxury goods at home—in an effort to actively improve their social standing. They adopted such strategies to circumvent the imperial system, which privileged white Europeans for the highest offices and imposed race-based restrictions on dress, marriage, occupation, and residence.

Arranged chronologically, the Spanish American objects in this gallery (complemented by a group of comparative British American pieces) show how material possessions functioned as signifiers of status and of changing religious, political, and racial identities. The colonial period saw the Christianization of America’s indigenous population, the emergence of local forms of Catholicism, numerous Indian revolts, and the rise of a distinct New World identity that fueled the wars of independence of the nineteenth century. In 1898 the Spanish-American War ended the empire’s rule of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last Spanish claims in the Americas.

Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Gómez de Cervantes
Apart from her eminent lineage and a brief description of her in the Gaceta de México newspaper as “a distinguished Lady commendable for her virtue and charity for the poor and those in need,” little is known about the private life of Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Gómez de Cervantes (1734–1776). She was born in Mexico City to one of the viceroyalty’s most elite Creole families. The noble title of third marquis of Santa Fe de Guardiola was first bestowed on Doña María’s ancestor by Charles II in 1691. At age eighteen, she married her uncle, preserving the family’s bloodline. The portrait illustrated here is displayed in the Sala section of the exhibition.

José Sarmiento de Valladares
Viceroy José Sarmiento de Valladares’s (1643–1708) first noble title was count of Moctezuma; it appears prominently in the foreground of his official viceregal portrait (see illustration). Sarmiento de Valladares acquired it through his first marriage to María Jerónima Moctezuma y Jofre de Loaisa, the great-great- great-granddaughter of the last Mexica (Aztec) emperor, Moctezuma II (1466–1520). In the first years of colonization, the crown encouraged intermarriage between members of the Spanish and Indian elites in order to reinforce peninsular Spaniards’ claims to higher status in the New World. Two hundred years later, associations with the distinguished Moctezuma line were still providing peninsular Spaniards like Sarmiento de Valladares with political legitimacy.

María Angela Cachicatari
María Angela Cachicatari’s six angel pictures were only a fraction of her magnificent collection, which included, according to her estate list in 1797, more than eighty paintings, sculptures, and painted prints displayed in nearly every room of her two Peruvian town houses and three country estates. Private collecting was a powerful way for Cachicatari, an unmarried woman of indigenous (Aymara) descent, to improve her social status in the eyes of those who entered her homes. Such visitors ranged from Spanish officers and priests, who classified the Aymara as indios amigos (friendly Indians), to the peasants working the farmland that probably fueled her New World fortune.

Teresa de Losada
A painting of Saint Joseph is one of six religious pictures listed in the 1690 will of Mexico City’s Teresa de Losada, a mixedrace woman of African descent. Upon her death, the once-enslaved Losada owned a home (bought with money borrowed from her grandchildren), four ounces of pearls, and a pearl necklace and earrings. She left some of the money she earned as a washerwoman and moneylender for fifty Masses to be said for her soul. Such piety was shared by individuals of many heritages in New Spanish society.

José Campeche
José Campeche (1751–1809) was colonial Puerto Rico’s celebrated mixed-race portrait and religious painter. He was the fifth son of a white Spanish woman from the Canary Islands and an enslaved Puerto Rican of African heritage who purchased his freedom after working as a painter and gilder. Campeche trained with his father and after his death took over the family studio. Among his elite clients were Puerto Rico’s Spanish-born governors, military officers and their wives (such as the sitter for the portrait on display nearby), and members of the upper clergy.

Juan Garrido
During Spain’s early expansion into Mexico, the black conquistador Juan Garrido (circa 1480–1547) encountered lords who, like Juan Tepetzin and his ancestors, were members of the indigenous Tlaxcalan elite. Garrido was a native of West Africa or possibly Portugal who crossed the Atlantic in 1503 as the enslaved servant of a white Spaniard. He participated in the Spanish conquests of Cuba and Puerto Rico before entering central Mexico, possibly in the retinue of Hernán Cortés. As a reward for his service, the crown granted Garrido his freedom, various minor posts, and, in 1525, a house plot in Mexico City’s traza, the residential quarter around the main square designed for white Spaniards and their descendants.